Shirley, RA., 2015.

Speed and Stillness: Driving in the Countryside

So often the rural is represented as an unpopulated landscape that is visited rather than lived in, and that is somehow associated with a generic past. This chapter re-thinks the rural as an active site of modernity. Using a wide range of textual and visual materials it explores a number of historical and contemporary perspectives on roads and driving brought together through the lens of speed and stillness. Firstly it attempts to re-think motorways as rural places, rather than urban enclaves (or non-places), examining the work of photographer and film maker Andrew Cross for what it can reveal about this process.The chapter works to recover the experience of speed and technology as one which can belong to the realm of the rural. This sometimes uncomfortable relationship is further explored in the next section which centres on how driving in the countryside has been conceptualised in the renowned magazine County Life.